The 2016 Horizon Report for Higher Education was officially released during the annual meeting of the Educause Learning Institute (ELI), which wrapped up yesterday in San Antonio, TX. If you aren’t familiar with it, the annual Horizon Report for Higher Education, now in its 13th edition, is an ongoing collaborative research project between the New Media Consortium and ELI designed to “identify […]
Category: Horizon Report
I am heading up to Alexandria tomorrow for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference. The NMC is best known for producing the Horizon Report, several annual publications that for the past decade or so have charted trends in educational technology and–although the organization has always distanced itself from this word–predicted the level of adoption of these technologies will have in various educational domains–higher ed, K12, museums, and libraries– along several adoption “horizons”–one year or less, two-to-three years, and four-to-five years. I’ve always found these prognostications problematic, untrustworthy, and ultimately not really useful. More useful is the sections of the reports that document current trends and provide links to case studies.
The focus of this conference is very different from the ones I usually attend, emphasizing creative educational practices using emerging technologies, and I’ve wanted to attend for a number of years. Either the location (Portland, OR last year) or schedule conflicts have prevented this. However, having the conference in DC this year (OK, technically Alexandria) has made it too convenient an opportunity to pass up this year. So, I have decided to jump in with both feet as well, as I have also volunteered to be a NMC Conference Correspondent. During the conference I will be crossposting from my social media accounts to the NMC conference blog and Twitter feed (@NMCorg #nmc15) mainly, as well as to the NMC Flickr group and Instagram account. We’ll see how it goes and if I can successfully keep all of these digital balls in the air.
I am a bit late to the game on posting this, but better late than never. A few weeks ago, the New Media Consortium released the 2013 Horizon Report for Higher Education, the yearly prognostications of educational and political thinkers on what educational technologies they see coming “on the horizon.” It is always an interesting read and thankfully the report authors don’t limit the focus to only technology tools but also include emerging practices. Below is a quick bulleted list of this year’s report. However, I advise you to download and read the whole thing. It’s free.
One Year or Less
- MOOCs
- Tablet computing
Two to Three Years
- Games and Gamification
- Learning Analytics
Four to Five Years
- 3D Printing
- Wearable Technology
Key Trends
- Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information–is becoming a value.
- Massively open online courses are being widely explored as alternatives and supplements to traditional university courses.
- The workforce demands skills from college graduates that are more often acquired from informal learning experiences than in universities.
- There is an increasing interest in using new sources of data for personalizing the learning experience and for performance measurement.
- The role of educators continues to change due to the vast resources that are accessible to students via the Internet
- Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.
Here is the full link to download the 2013 Horizon Report: http://www.nmc.org/publications/2013-horizon-report-higher-ed
